Thank you. Thank you all. Today I'd like to do a bit of a presentation of the company Tether, but also have the opportunity to talk with you, ask for your opinion on how things are going in the world. The title says 'Tether is a ray of stability in the chaos.' Why? Why do I talk about chaos, why do I talk about stability? Some time ago I did an interview with a journalist, and this journalist asked me to define my company Tether in a couple of words. Since Tether created the largest stablecoin in the world, the largest digital dollar in the world, the journalist suggested using 'stablecoin company' as the explanation, the two words to summarize Tether. In reality, I answered no, I think that's reductive. What we actually do, our mission, because it's something extremely difficult and almost impossible to do on a large scale, is to bring stability to society. So I realized, and my answer to the journalist was, 'We are the stable company.' What does it mean to be the stable company? A company that aims to bring stability to chaos. Chaos is not a bad word; chaos and entropy are fundamentally a constant in the universe. As the universe expands, starting from the Big Bang and continuing its growth, that entropy, the unpredictability of what happens within the universe, is chaos and entropy. So we shouldn't be too worried about chaos, but as a society, we need stability because we are human, we are people, we are communities, we are states, we are cities, so we need to find a sense of stability within chaos. And this sense of stability, in my opinion, can be brought, must be brought by various aspects that must be fundamentally present in our daily lives, in the daily lives of our families, in our communities. I thought of four aspects that I believe are fundamental, or perhaps the ingredients of a stable society. The first is financial stability, which is where Tether started in 2014. In 2014, Tether created USDT, which was the first stablecoin in the world, the first digital dollar on a blockchain in the world, and to date, USDT has more than 500 million users, mainly in emerging markets, developing countries. Yesterday we surpassed 183 billion in market capitalization. We are growing at a speed of 1 billion in market cap every 2 or 3 days. I'd like to say this happens because we are very good, which, well, I think we are not bad at all, but the reason we are growing so fast in market cap is because the world is moving towards chaos, the world is moving towards, as I sometimes say, darkness, a bit towards the shadows. I don't want to be a pessimist, but it's clear that inflation is increasing. There is growing disparity between social classes, between income brackets, there is increasing difficulty finding jobs, there is almost an incompatibility or friction within society that makes us very dissatisfied. There are also various other factors emerging as a society, pushing AI systems controlled by them, which are being sold as systems that will improve our society, our companies, our public and private activities, but in the way these AI tools are proposed, there is a non-minimal risk of further instability in a system that is, as I said, already fragile due to financial issues first and foremost, but also communication and information issues. So the concept of financial stability, which is the first concept I introduced, is fundamental. If people, if families don't have financial stability, what can they build? Indeed, as we all see, there is a decline in birth rates, so the population is becoming older. This is one of the fundamental reasons why this is happening. So if you analyze society and look at the main reasons for the degradation of societal stability, I believe the financial part is one of the main ones. Then, on the other hand, how can we act with an opposing force to this degradation, at least the financial one? And I think the answer is not easy and not unique, and it's all relative. We are here today in Switzerland. Switzerland is a very fortunate country compared to, for example, Bolivia or Nigeria or Venezuela, Vietnam, etc. Clearly. Switzerland is considered the freest, safest, and richest country in the world. So, almost absurdly, here we should feel at the maximum of human opportunity and possibility. However, I repeat, everything is relative. When you think about stability, and especially when you think about society, if the goal of society is to bring stability within communities and even entire nations, you have to think about how to start studying cases, examples to make this happen. So thinking of writing a letter to Santa Claus or Mary Poppins saying 'No, I want to bring stability to the world' is a bit difficult if we don't know where to start. So we thought of starting with boutique countries, developing countries that were reasonably small and that could allow us to see the results of our actions immediately or almost immediately. Let's think, for example, of a very interesting country, which is Bolivia. Bolivia is a country where the national currency is disintegrating against the dollar. It's a country that is extremely suppressed from a financial point of view because, again, if a local currency in a country is extremely weak against the dollar, all imports, all products imported into the country are priced in dollars. People, families who want to buy a phone, a television, or simply anything, that anything is priced in dollars. So if the national currency against the dollar is going to hell, it's clear that the internal society, the internal community is affected incredibly. And so we have seen, as you can now see on the Central Bank of Bolivia's website, the Bolivian central bank posts the price, the conversion of its local currency against the US dollar and against USDT. USDT has become the most used medium of exchange within Bolivia. Because when various central banks, especially of emerging countries, try to protect their national currency, try to protect the conversion of their national currency against the dollar, what do they do? They try to print as much money as possible and inject it into the market to stop people from selling the national currency against the dollar. But this obviously has the opposite effect and creates crazy inflation, crazy devaluation, etc. And people in Bolivia obviously found themselves in a condition where they could no longer have direct access to dollars, they could no longer find dollars on the streets, in black markets, which are very popular in emerging countries, but black markets need a physical thing, which is a dollar bill, and there it was no longer found, and so society in Bolivia started to worsen because people always needed more dollars. Imagine if you are a father, a mother of a family, you want to send your child to school, you need to buy tools, or you want to send them to university, you want to send them abroad for experiences? If your national currency continues to devalue against the dollar, what can you do? You work from January to December, you work hard for 12 months, and then in December you are poorer than in January. On the website of the Central Bank of Bolivia, the conversion rate between the local currency and the dollar is 7 to 1, and below is the conversion rate between the local currency and USDT, which is 17 to 1. So it tells you that the 7 to 1 is somewhat fake, and the real one, because USDT has become the most liquid currency within Bolivia, is actually 17 to 1, so more than double, almost two and a half times the devaluation stated by the Bolivian Central Bank. And it's not their fault; the problem is that there is a global system that includes tariffs now imposed by the United States, which fundamentally exports further inflation from the United States to poorer countries, to developing and emerging countries, and so there is a continuous degradation of society from a financial point of view. Having Tether, USDT in Bolivia is actually bringing stability. So the concept of stability, I repeat, is relative because here, obviously, if we bring USDT to Lugano, Switzerland, or the United States, it doesn't add a factor of stability within the nation itself, but in Bolivia it actually changes overnight. And so when we think about the concept of stability and what we can actually do, what are the actions, the small steps we can put in place, we noticed that having such a simple tool, which for many of us might be trivial like a digital dollar, changes the world for certain communities. Clearly, here we are at the Plan B Forum, we are actually telling them that there is something better than USDT because, again, everything is relative. If in Bolivia having a dollar changes things overnight compared to just keeping your savings in the national currency, if you go to the United States, having the dollar actually doesn't... you are used to having the dollar, but the United States also prints 3 trillion dollars a year, of which one trillion goes just to pay interest on the debt the United States has. One trillion goes to armaments, one trillion goes to welfare, social security, etc. And so again, everything is relative. So if stability for Bolivia can be USDT, stability for the United States cannot be USDT, it must be Bitcoin. So the ability to adapt, to create tools that can bring a concept of stability to everyone based on their needs is something that is truly the foundation of Tether. The other aspect, we've talked about financial stability, the other aspect we think is fundamental to bringing stability to society is stability in terms of communications and telecommunications. Having financial freedom through Bitcoin, USDT, or other tools is not sufficient if there is no freedom of speech or the possibility to express oneself. We haven't published it much, actually we haven't said it loudly, but as you probably know, in Europe in recent months there has been a lot of talk about chat control. There have been various attempts, it's not the first time it's happened, there have been various attempts to create laws in Europe that would force chat creators like WhatsApp, Telegram, to insert tools that would send all messages sent by people using these chats to data centers for pre-screening or screening to see if these messages could contain hate speech, could contain messages against the system, which in my opinion is absurd because if we take the concept of chat control that Europe is trying to implement and on the other hand the concept of digital euro, the digital currency that Europe is trying to implement, it's clear we are moving towards a despotic, dystopian system that is very close to what Europe criticizes China for, instead of moving towards a more libertarian direction. Europe was born as the cradle of freedom, the cradle of democracy, and instead the laws Europe is trying to implement are moving towards a degradation of freedoms. The degradation of freedom is explained as a necessity to make society more stable. This is what Europe wants to tell us, that society should be safer. They say, 'If you send a message that can contain something controversial, that can offend someone, society will worsen because you are creating misunderstandings, creating friction, so it can become a problem.' In reality, what they don't say, because it's hard to say it like that, is that Europe realizes that without chat control, without control over the currency, in a capillary way over every person in Europe, there is a risk that Europe will disintegrate. For Europe, capital control, communication control is the last stage to try to maintain and keep Europe together. I'm not saying that the European Union is not good, etc., I'm just analyzing the facts because I realize that if you want to do chat control, you want to decide what is right to send in a message, you want to decide what feelings people should have, you want to have control, you want to issue money directly, but you also want to have control over the wallet people use in their daily lives. In my opinion, the risk is very high because on one hand we already see what happens in England when someone complains or writes a message that can be perceived as aggressive towards someone else, that person goes to jail or risks jail, which in my opinion is a bit exaggerated, especially when you write a message considered aggressive, you risk jail, and on the other hand we add the piece that the State controls your account. Today, people who have had problems because they wrote a tweet that could be considered borderline, still had their bank account, had access to their money, maybe got a fine, absurd things, but until today there has always been a separation between State and money, between State and bank accounts, between State and ownership of money. Every person has always been free to have their own bank account, choose which financial institution to keep their money in. But the moment the European Union gives you a wallet and the European Union can follow and track every time you spend at the bar, can geolocalize you through your daily expenses, the moment Europe can decide what is right, what is wrong, what you can say, what you can't say, the step to blocking your account with the digital euro because you said something wrong is really short. That's a bit what is criticized about China when talking about social score and capital control. So it's absurd. Europe criticizes China when in reality it is moving towards the same type of Chinese control at an incredible speed. I repeat, because I think this is happening simply because if this didn't happen, Europe, which doesn't have a centuries-old history of unity more or less like the United States, like a federation, or like Switzerland, it's possible it would crumble. Europe was born 25 years ago as a union, as a federation, but on the other hand has 2000, 2500 years of history where more or less all states were at war with each other. So it's clear that to try to keep them standing, they keep adding more string and more tape until maybe things no longer stand up. So in my opinion, the concept of financial freedom and therefore financial stability and freedom of speech go hand in hand. So when we at Tether think about building tools that protect financial freedom, we think at the same time about building projects like Keet, like Holepunch, like Pear that give tools to people, communities, societies, companies that can defend freedom of speech. If we lose that, it's useless to have financial freedom. If you can send money to a friend but can't say anything to them because otherwise you go to jail, you are not truly free. The third part is energy freedom. Again, everything is relative. Here in Switzerland we have nuclear power plants and solar and gigantic installations, and in Europe they invest in renewables, but we realized that there are parts of the world, like Africa, where access to energy is really limited. In Africa there are 1.4 billion people and 600 million people don't have access to energy. And so when we think about societal stability, we must think about the fact that if we have 600 million people in the world, which is about 8% of the world's population, who don't have daily access to electricity, how can we make the world more stable if 8% of the world doesn't have access to a basic good like electricity? The absurd thing is that either all of society becomes stable, or we move society in a common direction of stability, or if we continue to create or widen the societal gap, we will never reach a better situation. So what did we do? We invested in a company that is bringing or creating a sort of decentralization of electricity. If you talk to some people about Africa, they say, 'No, because if we could bring nuclear to Africa and then build long-distance transmission lines, Africa's problem would be solved.' It's clear these people have never left, have never gone beyond Chiasso, because Africa is a continent so big, so vast. If you look at Africa from space, all of Central Africa at night is completely dark because, again, half the African population doesn't have access to electricity at night, lives in villages that are very separated and scattered. So we realized that the only way to bring stability to that part of African society, because there is South Africa and other states that are very advanced, but again, it's all relative. We decided to invest in this company that is creating kiosks in various villages. We started with a pilot, we created kiosks in various villages. These kiosks have solar panels on top and inside each kiosk has about 300, 400, 500 rechargeable batteries. So solar panels recharge the batteries inside the kiosk. We sell to people in the village a subscription for $3 a month, for 3 USDT a month, they can also pay in Bitcoin, they can recharge the battery four times. The average salary of a person in Africa ranges from $80 to $120 per month, so paying $3 for electricity is reasonable. Someone asked me why make them pay? Simply because every project you do must be sustainable. It's important that there is a vibrant ecosystem that grows, that is sustainable, that from the kiosk that gives you electricity can become a commercial center for the village, can sell books, can sell phones, education, internet connectivity, etc. So it must be a completely sustainable process. To date, we have created 500 kiosks and have more than 500,000 subscribers. It's an extremely successful pilot because with something extremely trivial that might seem a bit absurd here, we have brought electricity to 500,000 people. So we said with a reasonable investment, it won't be cheap, but a reasonable investment, by 2030 we can create 100,000 kiosks, give electricity to about 20-30 million homes, and therefore serve, in the end, in each home, if you count, there might be 4-5 people, you can give electricity to 120 million people. So think about how much money has been asked for, how much money European governments have given to charities, NGOs, etc. Something as trivial as a kiosk with solar panels and batteries, we have to be the ones to do it. It's the ridiculousness of the society we are living in. If a private company like us realizes there is a simple solution to a problem that is actually very simple, we are either really badly informed or we should really get angry because we have been taken for a ride for so long. Moreover, if we succeed, and I think we will succeed in the next 4-5 years, this change will be a change you can see from space, because again, if today at night Africa, Central Africa is very dark because there are no lights, in 5 years you will start to see lights, you will start to see Central Africa illuminated at night. So we have talked about financial stability, telecommunications, energy. The fourth is stability at the level of intelligence. Yesterday we launched the first project called Cuvac. It's an AI platform that works completely on our device, on our phone, on our laptop, on our desktop. And with this project we wanted to demonstrate that AI can be an extremely effective and important tool, but that at the same time can work directly on our devices, protecting our privacy. One of the biggest lies of the internet is that the cloud is our friend, they sell it to us with a smiling face as a tool to help us. In reality, it's not there to help us, it's there to help the coffers of big tech companies. The cloud is a tool that absorbs all our data, the most intimate information of our lives, and uses it to create profit for the companies, for big tech. And the sad thing is, it's a lie because the internet, when it was designed, when it was born, and as it still is today, was born peer-to-peer, point-to-point. When I connect my phone to the internet, when you connect your phone to the internet, you get something called an IP address. That IP address is a bit like your home address. When I have a home address, another person here will have their home address, let's say we both live in Lugano. If I send a letter from Lugano to a person who lives in Lugano, that letter doesn't go to Ireland and then come back to Lugano. In reality, when you use WhatsApp, that's exactly what happens. In Lugano, there are no WhatsApp data centers. So when you send a message from Lugano to a person in Lugano on WhatsApp, the message goes to Ireland and then comes back, and that's one message. Think that you send photos, videos, make video calls. All this, all these messages, all this data travel tens of thousands of kilometers in a completely unnecessary way. Why? Because the incentive of the internet, the incentive of the monetization of the internet has always shifted from wanting to create an educational system, a system that connects people, a system that gives access to information, which was the original idea of the internet, to wanting to create a system that centralizes information so I can make money on information. Because if I'm the only one, if I control the information, it's clear I make more money than others. And so there has been in the last 20 years a shift in the incentive system that has led to a centralization of the internet where 60-70% of all websites are hosted by three companies: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Indeed, we saw what happened a few days ago when part of Amazon went down, practically half the internet, half the applications didn't work anymore. Half the applications on your phone didn't work anymore. And that in my opinion is very worrying. And it's worrying if we add the fact that it's one thing to have our photos, but if we start to give or delegate all our intelligence to the cloud, I think we will have a bigger problem. I remember when I was in elementary school, we had to do additions, subtractions, divisions, even averages. I couldn't use the Casio calculator because the teacher would scold me, because the teacher wanted us to become good at doing mental math. But this thing has been lost, and today many people who have to do calculations, even simple additions, do them with a calculator. So think, if the calculator has such a heavy impact on our ability to do mental math, and it's such a simple, limited thing as a calculator, we're only talking about calculating two additions, imagine what an AI system can do to our mind and our ability to reason, to think, to innovate, to create. If we delegate all this to an AI, the impact is a million times more important, more detrimental than what a Casio calculator could have done to our ability to do mental math. Especially if we use something we don't even control. We are all bitcoiners here, at least I hope, and we say 'not your keys, not your coins.' So if we don't have our private keys, they're not our Bitcoins, they're someone else's Bitcoins. I would like to say 'not your AI, not your intelligence.' So if you don't have control of your AI, that's not your intelligence. And so also there, the reason why we launched Cuvac yesterday as a first product still in an embryonic phase is to demonstrate that it's a lie, as we demonstrated with Keet, that the lie is that we need the cloud to communicate people, to make them talk, to make them interact. With Keet we want to demonstrate that the lie is that we need data centers, to spend tens, hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure because otherwise AI wouldn't be possible. In reality, it's not true, and that's what we are demonstrating with Cuvac. I'll stop here, I don't even know how much time has passed, 40 minutes. If you have any questions, I'm available. I have just maybe 5 minutes.
